The Problem with Promises Read online

  Wolves protect their own.

  Mine, she snarled, swelling inside me.

  Sensations so strong, my sweet heavens. It wasn’t a flood, it wasn’t a tide, it was an immersion in animal heat. My heart was no longer a skittering, fluttering thing inside my chest. Now it felt like a giant muscle, squeezing and clenching. And with each contraction it poured another measure of rich, feral-spiced blood into my system.

  My wolf was rising. Let her come.

  A sense of superior physical strength—something I’d only felt vaguely once before—flooded inside me. All the things that I took for granted and never really thought of unless they were letting me down—my muscles, my balance, my sense of space and hearing—coalesced. This is how a natural athlete feels. Attuned to his body, confident that it could meet any challenge.

  I’m invincible. Even blinded and tied, and locked in a truck bed. We’re so strong.

  We listened to the sound of the cover shuddering. The lock sounded weak; it clicked against each tug of the wind. Weak things can be broken. I brought my knees up underneath myself.

  Do it.

  I surged upward. My shoulders hit the cover with the brute impact of a linebacker going for the block. The cover lifted, I could hear the lock being tested, and then the plastic gave. Cold air swirled around me as the lid was torn away. I’m free—Dorothy without the farmhouse!

  I struggled to stand. Anger and terror streaked through my belly as two very real hands bit into my shoulders. I squirmed, I kicked, I wriggled. His grip slid and bare human skin touched the vulnerable half-Fae flesh. On contact, blisters bubbled.

  “Stop fighting me, bitch! I’m trying to save you,” Itchy yelled hoarsely.

  So that he could kill me later?

  Sir Galahad caught me around my knees and threw me over his shoulder.

  I am not a thing to be grabbed and hauled and hurt and told what to do.

  I am Hedi.

  And I am as angry as my inner-bitch.

  Like a cornered wolf, I went with what I had—my teeth. My incisors bit down on his skanky ass while Merry went for his shoulder. His glutes flinched under our two-pronged attack and his spine went stiff as a poker—but I didn’t let go of my mouthful of blanket, dirty denim, and stringy butt cheek.

  Itchy took four more running steps, then tossed us. My own well-padded ass met the soil first, then my back hit something solid and flat, and finally my head met a surface far denser and harder than my skull.

  FYI. Never, ever slam the back of your noggin against a tombstone. Vomit rose, got halfway to my throat, then slid back to rejoin the bile in my churning gut. “Stay there!” Itchy shouted in my ear. His thigh brushed my hip as he hunkered down beside me.

  Mortal, do not touch us.

  Teeth clenched, I stretched my head back so that the blanket’s surface was tight, and Merry dove back to work on chewing a hole through the fabric. Hurry. I need to see. Red light flashed from her belly, as she struggled to enlarge the hole. The fabric gave, and I used my head to enlarge the aperture.

  Wind. It blinded me. Whipping my hair around my eyes. The smell of sulfur burned my nostrils. Evil was here. Its breath heated my face.

  I heard Itchy scream, “Jesus!”

  I opened my eyes and knew with sudden acuity the exact nature of the entity I’d sensed but not seen. Not a devil as humans understood him. No curling horns, no red glowing eyes or cloven feet. This beast was an oily shadow, gray as the smoke from a tire fire, coiling over us. A huge hulking mass, denser over the pond, but reaching all the way beyond the lines that Elizabeth had drawn in the earth. It was angry—I knew that instinctively right down in my Were bones—just as I understood that the creature would consume me and Itchy before it slunk back to the fire below.

  Because those witches—those women I’d dismissed as charlatans—had done it. They’d caught the vile and foul beast in the web of their intent.

  I struggled to my feet, frantic to free my arms. Itchy was staring upward at the twisting darkness above him, his expression frozen into a mask of stark horror.

  The beast’s mouth opened.

  I’d only succeeded in freeing one arm, and my back was against hard granite. Rapid-fire, my brain sorted the options. They were depressingly pitiful. Either sink into a ball and pray that the beast didn’t have a taste for Faes, or feed him a canapé.

  I’m a big fan of no one going hungry. I bent at the waist and charged into Itchy. My head hit his stomach with enough force for me to feel the jolt all the way down to the base of my spine. The biker staggered backward with a high scream, his arms flailing uselessly. I almost felt sorry for him—that biker who wished me harm—as tongues of darkness reached for him.

  I’m a bad, bad girl.

  Unrepentant, and probably damned, I fell to my knees and closed my eyes as the dark shadow swallowed him whole.

  * * *

  Here’s what you do when you’ve used up your last match. You put your faith in a divine force. I hunched up my shoulders, and silently prayed.

  Dear Goddess. Save me. And Trowbridge. Cordelia needs some help, and—oh yes, Lexi needs major rescuing too. Do this for me, and I’ll make it worth your while. Whatever you want, I’ll do it. I’ll be good. I won’t lie. I won’t cheat. I won’t flinch from what comes my way. Promise.

  A heavy gust of wind clawed at my blanket burka and tore it away—another token offered to the beast. I could feel the claw of him on my clothing, the stink of him on my skin. My Goddess was being curiously quiet. Screw it. I would not meet evil on my knees. I staggered upright, bent over against the wind.

  The wind, the wind. It sucked, it plucked.

  I clenched my teeth and forced myself to stand relatively straight. Or as vertical as you can, when the air is raking at you with claws of hunger and death and corruption.

  Make it fast, make it fast.

  There was a terrible roar, louder than a subway train hurtling past the station. I clapped my hands over my ears with a scream, and rocked on my heels.

  Do it. Don’t toy with me.

  Evil’s terrible exhale didn’t last long. That’s the way of it—screams and exhales never do. With a quiet moan, the cacophony died as quickly as it had come. Within two heartbeats, the anguished howl had died away, and the thunder had petered out to low grumbles.

  A shudder went through me.

  I waited. For the birds to commence tweeting or the other shoe to drop. But nothing happened, except it became marginally easier to breathe now that my lungs weren’t trying to suck air inside a vacuum and definitely harder to stand upright now that reaction was knocking at the door, requesting an audience.

  I opened my eyes. Broken branches had gathered at the base of the nearest grave marker. With a strange detachment, I found myself thinking of Mad-one’s barricade of twigs around the old elm up in Threall. And I wondered if she’d watched my soul-light blink in stuttering terror and if she worried in her own cool, detached manner that I wouldn’t come and lead her back to Merenwyn.

  Close one. Mad-one.

  I heard a bang. Somewhat muffled. I tilted my head. It wasn’t quite a bang; it was more of a ping. What would make that noise? Gunfire? Which led to … Trowbridge. Two unformed thoughts once linked together that hit the panic button all over again.

  Bang, bang.

  I slapped my hand on the top of the nearest hunk of granite and vaulted over it like I was a hopeful for the Canadian Olympic track team. Fear can make feet so fleet. See Hedi sprint. Flat out I ran, boobs bouncing hard, my serpent a dazed streamer from my pumping arm. Go faster. Merry pulsed red at my breast as I tore around the markers and sailed past the old tree.

  Trowbridge. Cordelia.

  Hell. I didn’t even bother to navigate around the last fence—I did a hurdler’s leap over the rotting pickets, landed neatly without breaking stride, and tore to the end of the cemetery’s cliff. There, I stood staring, stunned and disbelieving, at the scene in front of me. There was so much to absorb. And so much
being absorbed.

  Looking back, I’m sure that I only got half of it.

  * * *

  Lightning still flickered over the pond.

  I paused and shielded my eyes and searched, then—oh Goddess—I saw my guy and Cordelia. There—down by the edge of the pond. They’d retreated to the large boulder I called my pirate rock, and were crouched low by it.

  The water still roiled. A body, twisted, broken—Itchy’s—was impaled on the broken spar of one of the sumacs.

  I tore my gaze from that visual reminder of my misdeeds and looked upward, searching for the beast. I found the echo of it in the membrane-thin wall that was rising just beyond where Trowbridge had made a bridge out of two fallen logs and four pounds of muck. The ward’s growth was blisteringly fast—it was already rolling its edges, turning upward and outward, sinuously following the serpentine curve of the ridges.

  Such a thing is supposed to be invisible. That’s the whole point with wards. You can’t see it and you can’t detect it. And up to now, I’d been the dupe that had believed it to be a benign device. Protective and harmless. But now, the proverbial scales having been wrenched from my eyes, I could see it. Evil had been siphoned, intent and magic had communed, and now the coven’s creation was in its final throes of birth.

  Stop the bad from happening. That was my instinct. Helpless and hazy.

  But in truth, I was as powerless as the flock of finches that were trapped in the interior of that setting ward. They wheeled in confusion, their course changing direction with every terrified tip of the wing until the leader bravely went where no bird should go. They hit the ward, full on, then, stunned or dead, the finches plummeted, brown missiles, legs folded. Horrible.

  But what was happening on the beach was far worse.

  The demand for a bridge over the creek had just been a piece of fiction manufactured to keep Cordelia and Trowbridge toiling deep inside the parameter of the ward—a diversion to trap them inside while the ward was drawn—and an opportunity for the witches to quietly move to safety before the beast was called.

  Trowbridge lifted his arm and looked up at the things carried in that cyclone over his head—the spinning air above him carried the accumulation of anything that could be torn free from this world. Broken branches and stinging dirt. Wet leaves and the whipping ropes of lily-pad roots.

  All of that debris made it far easier to see the ward rising like a dark film behind him.

  He turned. Saw, just as I did, that the edges of it were flowing, stretching, searching for those lines drawn by the witches. Already the growing barrier was racing toward the path that wound up the ridge toward the Trowbridge home.

  It was the only avenue of escape.

  Trowbridge caught Cordelia’s arm and looped it around his shoulders, and then he hauled ass for both of them. Somewhere during the interim between bridge-building and beast-raising her tasteful gray sweater had been color dipped. Underneath her armpit, the fabric was red as my mother’s blood, but far less sweet.

  Gerry’s shoulder bunched, then he pulled the trigger again.

  I’m going to kill him for that. It was the simplest thought, but one of the clearest I’d had all day. I had tunnel vision. Long and narrow. There was only one thing at the end of my spy viewer: one gut-bellied biker with cadaver written all over him. My Were was engaged, and my Fae was conscious and with me again. She’d been longing to hurt something. To make something bruised and small, as she’d felt since the Old Mage had duped her and the beast had threatened her.

  Her wish to maim and hurt sang to us. More cunning than any portal song.

  “Yes,” she agreed, uncoiling herself from my wrist.

  Three-strong I spread my legs to steady us, then with a flick of my wrist, I cast my coil of magic toward the closest heavy thing.

  Lift.

  Raining earth, the tombstone rose jerkily in the air. A split second to aim, then we sent that heavenly marker on its mission.

  Perhaps Gerry’s sixth sense for danger—honed from years of his good standing so close to the devil—warned him. He turned, saw incoming, and ducked. Not fast enough to escape damage completely though. The rounded edge caught his shoulder. He lost his footing, but did not go down.

  Old bikers are used to being under fire. And I guess a tombstone of vengeance is no different than any other assailant. Coolly, he turned and shot at us.

  Blindly. At us.

  I saw the flash first, then a piece of granite flew right off the headstone to my right. My brain noted them, but distantly.

  “He is mortal, and therefore weak,” my Fae murmured.

  Hide from this, Gerry. I felt my face split into a dreadful smile. I don’t know what the biker read, but I was able to relish the fear that made his eyes round, and his eyebrows lift, and his stupid headband suddenly look too tight for his sweating face.

  He did a crouching run for safety, but he was fat, and old, and slow.

  And the tombstone followed.

  You can’t outrun a grave marker with your name carved on it. And in my mind, oh yes. His name was etched on this one. The first blow caught him between the shoulders. It felled him. The old biker collapsed on his hands and knees, and—oh sweet joy—lost his gun.

  Up in the air the tombstone went, down it came again. I hardly felt the strain on my wrist. There was no holding back. Howling “shits” and “fucks” like they were his own personal mantra, Gerry futilely tried to protect his head.

  Say good night, Gerry.

  Pleasure. I felt nothing but grim, rolling satisfaction. Up and down went the heavy stone, a clumsy hammer nailing shut a coffin.

  Over and over again.

  “Strawberry!” A loud voice cut through that mist of rage and anger, and jerked me back to the present. Where I stood, flanked by small tombstones for long-dead babies, my arm extended, my magic glittering from my fingertips.

  The joy—the savage, pure happiness of hurting someone—rolled away.

  My hand felt hot, and heavy.

  “Strawberry!” I heard someone shout. And then again, far louder, “Strawberry!”

  I blinked dully, noting that there was a tombstone in my hand—no, not in my hand. Attached to my paw through that part of me that was not me, but was me … and it had done something. Oh Goddess! Look at that. I shook my head, appalled and sickened. Fae-me sighed, peeved that I’d turned semimortal again.

  Enough, I said in a whisper.

  She let go of what remained of the tombstone. It was far smaller now, having broken in two at some point. It fell, with a hollow thump.

  I stared at the biker’s remains. How long had it taken me to turn his head into something terrible? Five strikes? Four? A handful of seconds to turn a man into that.

  “Strawberry!” I heard the man howl in fury.

  Trowbridge.

  * * *

  In the space of time it took to pulverize Gerry’s head, my man and friend had almost made it out—they’d covered the distance from edge of pond all the way to the top of the path and the old oak tree, where there should have been an exit point. A trapdoor in the magic. Keyed to recognize the secret password “strawberry.”

  Trowbridge unlooped Cordelia’s arm from his neck. He walked right up to the near-invisible barrier, and repeated the password, one last time. But the barrier never fell.

  They were trapped.

  The witches were long gone. Betrayal complete, they’d probably made tracks when things turned ugly with flying tombstones and raging Weres. Back to their car, and their lives. To their coven that at some point I would hunt down, and, one by one, eliminate.

  I imagine they will protest.

  That some of them, prior to their death throe, might point out that they’d done pretty much everything else we’d asked. Trowbridge had requested an enormous dome-shaped ward that followed the ridges surrounding the fairy pond—his, the Strongholds’, and the one I stood on. Well, they’d given it to him. The freakin’ thing was monstrous. And it looked so inn
ocuous—hardly more than a faint shimmering skin over an otherwise unchanged landscape. But it encapsulated everything. Water. Frogs. Crickets.

  Mates and friends.

  And there was no doorway. No exit keyed to the simple word “strawberry.”

  Feeling heartsick, I left what remained of Gerry-bloody-Gerry and walked like a girl caught in the teeth of a very bad dream all the way to the edge of Casperella’s stone wall. I could have spared my demolition attempt. If the Fae ghost had stayed within her spit of land, she would have had easy access to the portal because the shimmering veil of the ward extended all the way to the crumbling ruins of her wall.

  I stared at it, thinking dumbly, it’s a wall. Between him and me. A final one, unless I could think how to break it. Slowly my gaze traveled from it to My One True Thing. “You okay?” I asked my mate.

  “I’ve had better days,” he said, glowering at the wall in front of him.

  I saw the muscles on his back bunch.

  “Don’t touch it!” I cried. “It’s foul!”

  If he heard me, he didn’t pause. The Alpha of Creemore punched at the shimmering wall with all his considerable frustration. His knuckles met something solid—I saw the recoil of his arm—and the witches’ net spat out a shower of red sparks.

  But unlike me, it didn’t call to his magic. Trowbridge danced back, rubbing his knuckles. He said some words, and then a few more. Clearly, he was more furious that he’d been rendered impotent than appalled by the darkness sensed on contact.

  “I will hunt down the witches,” I told Trowbridge, striving to sound hopeful. “I’ll leave now.”

  “I don’t think you can,” he replied, confirming my private thoughts.

  “We’ll find them, Trowbridge.”

  But it will take time.

  My man stared sightlessly down at his feet for a moment, then he gave himself a brief nod and squared his shoulders. He pivoted to give me a strained smile. “Get Harry, Sweetheart. Tell him we’re looking at Plan B.”

  “What’s Plan B?”

  He exhaled, as if he was very, very tired. “Go find Harry, Tink.”